Earth Joy Writing

Earth Joy Writing is a new version of The Artists' Way for the green generation. In the years since the hugely successful Artists' Way book hit the market, three important changes have occurred. First, our lives are much more interconnected on a daily basis through the Internet and social marketing networks. Second, we are highly aware of the grave dangers our environment faces. Third, we can sense a surge in a collective desire for community. This book addresses all these needs for readers -- to live a harmonious and balanced life despite the vast changes happening around them, and to connect with others and the earth in meaningfully creative ways.

The author, Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., is uniquely qualified to address both the theoretical and practical aspects of how one goes about co-creating a life of balance with the natural world. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and writer and an award-winning teacher with two decades of experience teaching in university and community settings. She is also an accomplished scholar who has researched and written about how poetry can be a unique way of healing from traumatic histories. She has brought these talents to bear in her Co-Creating practice, through which she coaches individuals and leads workshops on using creativity and interaction with nature to bring about balance in personal, professional, and community contexts.

The diversity and flexibility of Cassie Premo Steele's background is reflected in the book. Weaving together both lyrical and reflective aspects with scholarly, researched material makes the book accessible to a wide audience.

The book is based on the months of the year and addresses the barriers and blockages that people encounter in their search for connection and balance with the Earth, using personal experience to tell stories for the reader that reveal life lessons. These lessons are opened up to the reader in the form of suggestions of writing exercises one can do alone or with other people.

Earth Joy Writing can be used as a book of wisdom, read sequentially, or opened up at random to allow a person to reflect on a struggle being currently experienced. Plus the book can be used as a template for a group that might want to meet regularly to discuss the ideas and practice the exercises together. Indeed, all of the exercises in the book have been tested in individual and group workshops with Cassie Premo Steele and move readers into joy with themselves, others, and the Earth.

This is more than a book about creative writing. It is a book that will help readers become more creative writers and thinkers through the connections they develop or re-establish between themselves, their family, and nature. With the right conditions and frame of mind, creativity can grow from not only our own experiences, current interactions with nature, but also through reflection and looking at the unknown."​ --Serena M. Agusto-Cox, Savvy Verse & Wit

​“Drawing on the intuitive and integrative connection between writing and nature, Earth Joy Writing guides the writer into a deep relationship with the world and the words that surround her. Filled with respect for the shifting seasons of the earth and our creative lives, and rich with exercises and insights, this book is a gem for writers at any level.” — Laraine Herring, author of Writing Begins with the Breath

The book is designed to activate the reader into regular journaling using prompts that take her into memory, into outdoor places, into the body, using exercises that encourage not just writing, but drawing, collage, photography, music, movement, and even eating. The graphic design supports the reader through the effective use of white space to make space for contemplation, to give the reader and nascent journaler time to begin, and to break up the many tasks the book offers." --Anne Milne, University of Toronto Scarborough

While we move through that process, what we are learning is how to use an extended metaphor to make sense of our lives and our feelings. We learn the benefit of research in the writing process, how we can extend what we sensed into what we know, how our engagement with the natural world can help us to co-create. This is powerful teaching in part because of its subtlety." --Camille Yvette Welsch, Literary Mama